Short videos are in high demand. Across large platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, users are watching billions of videos every day. Companies are benefitting massively from this content explosion. For creators, this often means there is pressure to create more content than ever before to stay relevant and make a living. This pressure is increasing as more AI-generated content is infiltrating these platforms.
Jay Neo, a creator and former content lead for short videos at MrBeast, believes AI can help creators understand what is working for them and generate new content ideas in that direction. That is why, along with former Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, he is building a platform called Palo to aid creators.
Neo joined MrBeast at eighteen to work on viewer retention. He became fixated with studying different metrics to understand where video viewership dipped. He was obsessed with retention graphs and figuring out why viewers stayed or why they left. He kept a document where he noted all this down. Gradually, his role shifted to include more responsibility around editing and ideation.
A key achievement for Neo was a video where the creator asks people on the street if they would fly to Paris to get a baguette. That video garnered more than one point eight billion views across channels. MrBeast ended up making multiple videos with this format.
In 2023, Neo left MrBeast and started several channels under the Creaky branding with another MrBeast co-writer. He scaled these channels to over a billion views per month. Through these experiences, Neo understood the power of content formulation and analytics. While building Creaky, the team used multiple spreadsheets tracking different video metrics. An advisor suggested he turn these insights into a product for creators, so he started working with Palo’s other co-founders in early 2024.
Palo has three core parts to its app: an AI-powered ideation and planning tool, analytics, and a community. The company onboards a creator and asks them to integrate all their accounts. The tool then analyzes all their short videos and provides insights into what is working and what is not.
Kumar, the Chief Technology Officer at the startup, said that Palo uses a mix of models to extract a data tree with insights into hooks, audience sentiment, interest topics, originality, and possible related search terms. The inference engine uses a combination of top large language models to hierarchically aggregate these data points. All of this helps build a persona for the creator that is true to them and fully aware of their taste and style.
The AI planner has a conversational interface, like any other chatbot, where creators can ask general questions about their content. They can also ask the tool to create a script based on a formula. For visual creators with less speech in their clips, the tool can create a storyboard with different hooks. The community part is currently nascent and allows creators to message each other.
In its test phase, the company worked with around forty creators with more than one million users across channels. Today, the company is opening up its tool to creators with one hundred thousand followers. The starting price is two hundred and fifty dollars a month, with costlier tiers available for higher usage rates.
The company has raised three point eight million dollars in funding from Peak XV’s Surge, with participation from NFX and individual investors. Peak XV’s managing director, Rajan Anandan, said the firm was introduced to Palo’s team by one of Neo’s mentors. He cited the team’s experience in successful creative teams and their technical understanding as reasons for the investment. He stated that creators are looking for tools that make their process smoother without taking away their voice, and the Palo team had unusual clarity about where the real value lies.
Josh Constine, a former TechCrunch editor and investor in Palo, said the tool can help creators keep up with heavy content demands. He mentioned experiencing burnout as a creator himself, which is why he invested. He explained the challenge of having to spend hours consuming content to keep up with viral trends, which can rewire your brain to default to consumption instead of creation, leading to procrastination and burnout.
Palo’s launch comes at a time of palpable tension between AI and the creator community. Platforms like TikTok, Meta, and Google have added more AI-powered tools for creators. While creators have started using AI tools, prominent figures like MrBeast have spoken about the potential negative impact on the industry.
A core challenge in creating AI tools for creators is avoiding formulaic habits of creating similar content. Neo said that Palo tries to nudge creators in a direction where they might be successful, but he admitted that good videos will still come from creators’ gut feelings. He offered an analogy, comparing a comedian trying new material on stage and gathering data from the audience’s reaction. Each performance becomes an iteration, and each new audience benefits from what the comedian learned from the show before. Neo believes AI can give creators a similar advantage.